by Alen Mattich
Della Torre scrambled backwards, desperately trying to get behind a nearby tree, firing the Beretta more in an effort to distract them than out of any hope of hitting anything.
Then he saw the rifleman shift the big gun in his direction. It was long and ugly with its disproportionate telescopic sight. At that distance, the shooter couldn’t miss. Della Torre, despite moving all the while, was mesmerized. The rifleman’s preparatory sequence singed itself into his mind. Bolt pulled back. Released. Hand down towards the trigger. Rifle up, level with the man’s ribs, its bipod legs spread open, hanging in the air. The cavernous barrel aligned with the stock, marking an invisible line straight to della Torre’s midriff.
The other Bosnian, the one with the submachine gun, had stopped to change magazines; della Torre could hear the click as it went in.
The rifleman wore aviator sunglasses and a baseball cap backwards. But what struck della Torre was the man’s satisfied grin. Instinctively, della Torre braced his muscles against the coming impact of the gunshot. He winced in anticipation, though he suspected he wouldn’t feel much for long.
But the muzzle flash never came. Instead, the shooter’s forehead bloomed open like a red and white rose and then disgorged a pale blue-grey mass. The shooter fell forward, smashing face-first into the fallen tree with the hollow sound of a dropped watermelon. And then he disappeared from della Torre’s sight.
The other Bosnian dropped the submachine gun and crouched down to his fallen comrade. “Elvis. Elvis. Shit, holy mother of God and Mohammed’s angels.”
Then the submachine-gunner, small and thin, popped up from under the tree trunk and bolted, full of panic and noise, heading straight at della Torre.
“Gringo.” It was Rebecca, from somewhere in the trees. “Get him. Go.”
But the man shot past della Torre before he could aim the Beretta.
Della Torre got up, the pain of his fall deadened by adrenaline, and chased after the Bosnian through the undergrowth. The Bosnian was small and skinny and fast, quickly pulling away from della Torre, who gulped air into his tobacco-dulled lungs, his thighs aching as he climbed the hill.
The ground underneath became rougher and harder, and the trees ended in a low, rough cliff of white stone. The shooter had started to climb but hadn’t gotten far. Della Torre couldn’t have asked for a clearer target. The sun was reflecting on the stone around the man so that he looked nothing more than an insect on white paper. He’d lost his hat, and his brown hair was almost as long as a girl’s. He struggled to find handholds, clawing the stone in desperation. He was unarmed.
Della Torre chambered a bullet, raised the Beretta, and took a shooting stance, as he’d been taught all those years ago. With his thumb he ensured the safety was off.
“Halt,” he called out.
The Bosnian kept trying to climb but turned to look down at della Torre. It wasn’t a man he was chasing. It was a boy. He had a little fuzz on his top lip, and eyes like a deer’s, full of fear, self-pity, horror.
“Halt,” della Torre shouted again. But the boy continued to scramble like a drowning man struggling for air.
Della Torre fired. Once. Twice. Scoring the stone above the boy’s head.
“I said halt.”
The boy finally stopped. He was shaking, tears streaking his face.
Della Torre stared at him. He couldn’t have been more than fifteen or sixteen. “Why were you shooting at us?”
“I don’t know.” The boy spoke in that drawling, undulating accent of the deep Bosnian valleys.
“Tell me now or I’ll shoot you off that rock.”
“I don’t know,” came the panicked voice, high-pitched with fear. “Elvis got the job. He said we were after a cop. Dad just drove. I wasn’t shooting, I swear. I was just there to hand them the ammunition. I swear I wasn’t shooting. Ask Dad, he’s at the car. Ask him.”
“What cop? Who paid Elvis?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know.”
“Were you in Zagreb waiting for us?”
“Yes, but I don’t know anything.”
“Whose car was it?”
“I don’t know, Dad got it. Dad gets cars. Please don’t shoot me. Please don’t shoot me.”
He didn’t doubt that the boy knew nothing.
Maybe Elvis knew something. Had known something. But he’d looked pretty dead when della Torre saw him last.
Somebody’d paid the Bosnians to follow them and to shoot them. They’d even fixed them up with a nice car.
A gloom settled on della Torre. What to do with the boy?
They couldn’t take him to the police station back in Gospić. It’d be difficult to cover up the gunfight, and once it got out that an American woman had been involved, he knew the pandemonium it would cause.
“What’s the name of the cop you’re after?” della Torre asked again. “Who’s the cop? Why did you want to shoot him?”
“I don’t know.” The boy was frightened, tearful. “Elvis’s cousins paid him because the cop owed them money and caused problems. Dad knows them. Ask him. He’ll tell you. He’ll tell you who they are.”
“Get down here,” della Torre said. “Quick, if you want to live.”
The boy scrambled down. He was even more pitiable on close inspection. His camouflage gear hung loosely on his thin frame; his pimpled face was blotchy with tears.
“Boy, I’ll tell you this once, and then I’m not responsible for you. You run in that direction; follow the cliff, don’t try to go up it. When you find a track, follow it to a village. Tell them what you like, but don’t tell them about this.”
“What about Dad?”
“Forget about Dad. Dad’s going to jail,” della Torre lied. “You find a bus to take you to Zadar and you call your people to fetch you. You understand?”
The boy nodded, though he might just have been trembling.
“You got money?”
The boy shook his head.
Della Torre pulled a couple of notes out of his wallet and handed them over.
“You tell nobody nothing, understand? Anybody asks, you don’t know, because that’s the truth. Go. I’m going to fire a couple of shots after you. Don’t stop and don’t turn around, because if you do, boy, you’re dead.”
The boy nodded. And then he ran, sobbing, while Della Torre fired twice into the trees.
He was close enough to touch the rifle’s muzzle. He hadn’t been as cautious as he should have been. The shooting had stopped and the woods were quiet, dappled pale green with spots of sunlight. Insects, like motes of dust, danced in the light. He’d stepped between two trees only to see death’s small round eye staring at him.
Rebecca lowered the gun before he had a chance to react.
“You should be more careful when going out for a stroll in the woods. I heard the shots and came to see if it was you or him,” she said.
“I was the one doing the shooting.”
“So you couldn’t run him down?” she laughed.
Della Torre shrugged noncommittally. “I smoke too much.”
“It’ll kill you.”
“So they say. Thanks for getting the shooter.”
“It was a snatched shot. You were lucky I got him the first time. Quite something, a Krönlein shot. I’d only ever heard about them,” she said.
“A what?”
“Krönlein. A high-velocity bullet at close range. Blows the top of the head right open and pops the brain out in one whole piece. They’re rare.”
“Oh,” he said, remembering the instant of the man’s demise. He hadn’t even had time to register surprise. “His name was Elvis.”
“Was it?”
“That’s what the boy called him,” he said. “I mean, when they were talking and just before he was about to shoot me.”
“Did he?” Rebecca smiled
. “Well, I guess there’s no longer any doubt that Elvis is well and truly dead.”
Della Torre couldn’t share the joke.
“Were there any others?” he asked, pushing his thoughts away from the bloody image.
“There’s the one by the Hilux. He’s not going anywhere fast. I don’t think there’s anyone else, but I’ll take a look around. Why don’t you go tell Julius that he can put the gun away.”
Della Torre nodded, though he wasn’t feeling very hopeful about catching Strumbić’s attention without getting shot.
He edged gingerly to the edge of the wood by the road, sheltering behind a tree.
“Julius,” he shouted. No response. “Julius.”
“Gringo?” came the faint reply.
“Don’t shoot. Do not shoot. Understand?”
“Yes.”
He made his way around the tree and into the light. Immediately he heard the rip of Strumbić’s machine gun.
“Stop shooting,” he yelled, his face pressed against gravel, tasting the dusty road. He shouted until he thought he’d stripped his throat raw.
From across the cornfield he heard Strumbić laugh hard and loud. And then, just as suddenly, he stopped.
Della Torre got up warily, ready to duck again, but Strumbić was quiet. He ran down the road in a semi-crouch, ready to dive onto the verge at any moment, his heart beating hard from the effort. He stopped at the still-smoking Mercedes, furious, gripping the Beretta hard, sore with temptation to fire it into the corn.
“What the fuck were you doing, Julius?” he said.
Strumbić remained crouched at the edge of the cornfield. “Sorry, didn’t realize it was you.”
“The fuck you didn’t. Liar,” della Torre said. “Come on. Get out of there. The shooter’s dead and we don’t have to worry about the others.”
“Can’t.”
“What do you mean you can’t?”
“Do me a favour, Gringo. Grab my bag out from the trunk and throw it over to me. And a bottle of water from the car.”
“Why don’t you just come and get them yourself?” Della Torre wasn’t having any of Strumbić’s games.
“Because I shat myself and I’d like to freshen up, if you don’t mind.”
“You what?”
“You heard me.”
Della Torre hooted. It came as a blessed relief after the terror of those minutes in the woods. “You got so scared that you shat yourself?”
“No. It only just happened. I was laughing so hard at you eating asphalt that, I don’t know, must have been the fucking lunch in Gospić, poisoning bastards.”
Della Torre couldn’t stop laughing.
“Okay, so it’s funny,” Strumbić allowed. “I thought I just needed to fart.”
Della Torre did as Strumbić asked, passing him the chamois cloth from the boot as well.
“I would be much obliged if you didn’t make this general knowledge,” Strumbić said.
“What’s it worth to you?”
“It’s worth me not murdering you in your sleep. And I’ll let you off the hook for those three cartons of Luckys you stole off me in the spring.”
“And your leather jacket?”
“I got that back. That and the Beemer. It’s just the money you owe me. But we won’t talk about that now.”
Della Torre gave Strumbić some privacy to clean himself up and change. Once Strumbić was decent again, they strolled to the Hilux, kicking up white dust along the broken asphalt and gravel road.
“So what happened?” Strumbić asked.
“Shooter got shot.”
“You?”
“No. Rebecca.”
“Any others?”
“Some guy by the Hilux I haven’t seen yet, and a boy.”
“Dead?”
“Not the boy.”
“You shoot the guy by the Hilux?”
“No.”
“But you let the boy go.”
“Good guess.”
Strumbić tapped his nose. “Never had you down for a killer. The redhead, on the other hand . . . Seems she doesn’t just eat men.”
Della Torre nodded. He’d met plenty of killers before, but never one like Rebecca.
There was a body slumped in the driver’s seat of the Hilux, head hanging out the window and black blood pooling on the dusty white ground.
Strumbić was the first to see it. “Shit. He moved.”
They ran, closing the distance fast. They pulled the man out of the car and lay him flat on the ground. He’d been shot in the head. The bullet had mashed his left cheek, destroying his eye and crushing part of the forehead, but the man was still breathing. They couldn’t tell if he was conscious, though he might have been talking. He was making a grumbling, moaning sound. It had a rhythm to it. Maybe he was praying. He was almost blue, he was so pale — where he wasn’t caked with blood.
“Can you hear us?” della Torre asked.
The man didn’t respond. Just kept making that small, regular moan.
“He’s not long for it,” said Strumbić.
“Unless we get him to a hospital.”
They heard a rustling in the wood. Both men crouched down behind the Hilux, guns at the ready.
“It’s just me,” Rebecca called.
“This one here’s still alive,” della Torre shouted back to her.
She rushed over to them. “He saying anything?”
“No.”
“Nothing?”
“I don’t think so. Nothing I can understand. We need to get him to a hospital, fast. Otherwise he isn’t going to make it.”
She stood over them, silently surveying the man on the ground.
“He’s not going to make it,” Rebecca said with finality.
“You don’t know. You’ve made a mess of his head, but he’s breathing and the bleeding seems to have slowed. If he’s lasted till now . . .” Della Torre, knee on the ground next to the man, turned to Strumbić. “How long to Zadar, do you think?”
“Hour. Drive fast, maybe less.”
“We’ll have to take him back to Gospić, then. They have a country hospital there.”
“No, he’s not going to make it. Can he talk now? Can we get something out of him?” Rebecca asked.
“I don’t think so. Medical attention and a month in hospital, and we might start getting some sense out of him. But not in the state he’s in now.”
“I’m afraid he’s not going to a hospital.”
Della Torre stood to confront her, but she just smiled, pulled out the Beretta that she’d tucked into the back of her shorts, the one from the car, under the driver’s seat, and operated the slide so that he could hear a bullet click into place. She bent down and shot the man through his open mouth. The man jerked, and fresh scarlet blood spread from under his head into the white dust.
“He didn’t make it.”
Both della Torre and Strumbić stood still, shocked at the execution. For a moment della Torre’s ears buzzed and he felt oddly light-headed, but he willed himself not to faint. And then he felt his back pocket to make sure his passport was there. His secret American passport, which he always travelled with, keeping it like a talisman against . . . against what, exactly? Against becoming an unidentified, abandoned corpse? At least the Americans always took an interest in their citizens. Especially dead ones in foreign countries.
“Let’s get the one from the woods,” Rebecca said.
She left her rifle in the Hilux and led the men back to where the shooter had been. Della Torre and Strumbić stumbled in her wake.
Rebecca carried the shooter’s equipment as well as his rifle and the machine gun back to the truck, while della Torre and Strumbić dragged the corpse by its feet, looking away from the mangled head, which was churning the dry leaves into
a painted trail of blood and soil. They left the brain where it was.
When they had the two corpses lined up on the side of the road, they went through the vehicle. There were clothes in a couple of holdalls in the back of the Hilux, along with a handgun and boxes of ammunition. A bag of snack food was in the back seat: boxes of pretzel sticks, a loaf of bread, half a salami, and a block of cheese, along with a couple of boxes of biscuits. Strumbić found an unlabelled three-quarters-full glass bottle in the front.
“Slivovitz,” he said, having unscrewed the lid and sniffed. “Want some?”
Della Torre shook his head. Strumbić took a long pull from the bottle.
They wiped the blood off the front seat with one of the Bosnians’ shirts soaked with slivovitz, but otherwise the truck had been spared damage. Della Torre puzzled over the bullet’s exit path and then realized what Rebecca had done. She’d shot him through the open window. He’d been sitting on the other side of the truck. The impact of the bullet had pushed the man’s head out of the driver’s-side window so that almost none of his blood, other than a bit of fine spray from the initial wound, stained the interior. It left the truck all but unmarked. Was that intentional?
Whether it was or not, they needed another vehicle after the Merc’s demise. It looked like the Hilux would have to do.
The keys were in the ignition.
“Guess they correctly figured we’d pulled off somewhere earlier, and found themselves a nice ambush spot,” Rebecca said. She kicked the ground, raising a little cloud of white. “Must have been looking for our dust.”
She and Strumbić went through the men’s pockets. The driver’s licences confirmed they were from Bosnia, from the hills around Bihać, an hour’s drive northeast. Between them, they had a couple of hundred Deutschmarks and a fair stack of dinars. There were some photographs of women and babies and various slips of paper, stamps, and business cards. Nothing terribly meaningful. Elvis’s name really was Elvis. He’d been in his late twenties. The driver had been pushing forty.
“So what we do now?” Strumbić asked.
“Now we load them into the back of the Hilux and take them back to the Merc. See if you can find something to cover the floor so that they don’t make a mess of the truck.”
